Does Your Sexual Identity Really Need a Label?

Recent surveys show 31 percent of Millennials identify as something "other" than straight.

By
Michelle Tea

Apr 30, 2016

Owen Gildersleeve

In my early 20s, in the candlelight of a Back Bay apartment, I kissed a girl. It was immediately my favorite thing to do. I wanted my boyfriend to go away forever. Oh my god, I'm a lesbian! I thought.

As Jessica became my first girl, my boyfriend became, for quite some time, my last boy. Sex with him had always felt blatant and pre-configured. The sex I entered into with Jessica was a dark forest, a fairy tale you get lost in. I realized that with men, a part of my heart was on high alert always. With my boyfriend, some essential part of myself was not at play in the sex we'd had. Yet within moments, Jessica, this stranger, had access to it all. I was whole.

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I wanted to build my life around this experience, and I did. Revising my hetero history, I decided the eyeliner-wearing Goth boys I pursued in high school were simply the closest I could come at the time to a girl. I got rid of my thrift-store lace dresses and popped on a baseball cap with "Dyke" emblazoned above the brim. I hit Goodwill in search of Little League T-shirts to wear with cutoff army pants. I shaved my head. There — I was a dyke, I'd always been a dyke, and I'd always be a dyke. Now, buzz off!

Coming out in the early '90s, at a time when the fight for gay rights was gaining ground, a solid, even confrontational sexual identity was demanded (We were born this way, dammit!). Anything less was seen as wishy-washy, smacking of internalized homophobia. For gay women, an interest in men marked one as a traitor to queerness and feminism. People who identified as bisexual were schemers looking to keep one foot in the world of heterosexual privilege. As for those who opted out of a sexual identity, well, they were quite possibly insane.

There were reasons for the militancy of the times. The first thing most people heard when they came out to family was the suggestion that their attractions were a phase, like a cloud passing over the sun. The entire world was desperate to invalidate homosexual desire, and if you admitted to even a sliver of ambiguity, it would try to make you live there. After all, queerness was deviant, diseased, fatal. If you could perhaps experience love with a member of the opposite sex, why wouldn't you? The only stance to take was an unwavering, in-your-face declaration of total homosexuality. So chanted Queer Nation, one of the big activist groups of the time: We're here, we're queer, get used to it!

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Such a difference a decade or two makes. Watch as celebrities du jour Kristen Stewart, Miley Cyrus, Cara Delevingne, and Lily-Rose Depp refuse to satisfy the public with a neat explanation of their sexual orientation. Instead, they are "coming out" as pansexual, sexually fluid, undecided, or somewhere else on the spectrum. Quipped Grammy-winning singer St. Vincent, "I believe in gender fluidity and sexual fluidity. I don't really identify as anything."

The same is happening among everyday people. A recent survey on sexual identities by YouGov, an internet-based research firm, had 31 percent of Millennials identifying as something "other" than straight as compared to only 10 percent of older generations. A report by trend-forecasting agency J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group found that only 48 percent of people ages 13 to 20 (Gen Z) identify as exclusively heterosexual compared to 65 percent of Millennials ages 21 to 34.

This dismissal of a rigid orientation is a result of queers winning their cultural battles, of homophobia finally taking its rightful place alongside racism and sexism — real social ills. After all, if it's no big whoop to be gay, why not keep your options open?

About 15 years ago, Emily Nagoski, PhD, author of Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, spoke on a panel about bisexuality at Indiana University. "One gay young man raised his hand and said, 'I think when people are less homophobic, fewer people will identify as bisexual,'" Nagoski recalls. "I replied, 'I think when people are less homophobic, almost everyone will identify as bisexual.'"

Conversations about the rise in sexual fluidity often focus on the transformative effect such anti-identities have on people who would have traditionally identified as straight. With the stigma of queerness removed, why wouldn't men and women act on same-sex desires or simple curiosities? But the liberation cuts both ways. In a culture where the gray space may be overtaking the rainbow, queers who may have felt cultural pressure to identify as all-the-way gay are also freed up to act out on the occasional hetero fancy without feeling like they're letting down an entire community.

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The overwriting of my own complicated sexuality into a strictly lesbian one was called out when a serious girlfriend had the profound revelation that he was actually male. As I sorted out what this meant for my identity, I landed in a more honest place. I was attracted to women, yes, but to guys as well. I was attracted, in the end, to everyone. With my newly transgender boyfriend, I acquired a new language. If individuals making a gender transition are trans, from the Latin "other side of," then folks whose gender matches the cultural expectations of it are cis-gendered, Latin for "this side of." Being so close to a trans community also made me understand the true limitations of a bisexual orientation. As it turns out, there are more than two genders — there's a spectrum!

Indeed, the current move toward sexual fluidity is happening hand in hand with recent strides in trans visibility. Jill Soloway, creator of the Emmy-winning show Transparent, mused to me on the way that trans people can inadvertently broaden a person's notions of who exactly they are attracted to: "Are these gay or lesbian crushes? Or straight or queer or gender-fluid crushes? Maybe just crushes. Maybe just sex. Maybe just love."

After that boyfriend and I broke up, it seemed likely I would end up in a heterosexual relationship with a cis-gendered guy. I was getting older and wanting to settle down, and straight men seemed preprogrammed for that type of situation. There was something sort of great and rebellious, after a decade of extreme lesbianism, to be sort of preferring men. But despite the giddy novelty of embracing my attraction to them, the reality of men disappointed. Bringing my queer, feminist self into the heterosexual dating world made basic interactions with men land mines. It's exhausting to argue with your date about how trans women are actually women or how girls who sleep around aren't sluts. At the end of my spell of heavy dating, I knew that hetero wedding bells would not be ringing for me. Anyone I was going to spend that much time with would have to be a real soul mate and, for me, that meant a woman.

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Social change moves at a glacial pace, but pop culture has been laying the groundwork for an embrace of label-free identity since the '90s. There was Madonna's 1992 Sex book, which featured the icon cavorting with shirtless hunks but also gangs of girls with shaved heads and dyke swagger. Queer idol Sandra Bernhard's Roseanne character dated women and men, confusing some ("I thought you were our 'little gay friend,'" Roseanne complains).

The sexual fluidity on screen continued through the 2000s, with Julianne Moore stepping out on Annette Bening for a tumble with Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right. (Who could blame her? Don't most lesbian relationships have a Mark Ruffalo clause?) Sex and the City regularly flirted with the concept of fluidity. Remember the episode that revealed Carrie's boyfriend to be bisexual? Later in the series, Samantha hooks up with lesbian Maria. Fluidity even made appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Grey's Anatomy. These breaks from television's regulation heterosexuality were on a continuum with real-world triumphs.

For some women, like Regan, a 33-year-old food stylist from Birmingham, Alabama, the push toward a label-free sexuality comes as a relief. "My secret wish is to live in a world where it's a non issue for everyone everywhere." For others, like artist Nicole J. Georges, who chronicles her lesbian relationships in her graphic novel Calling Dr. Laura, sexual identities remain a source of community and comfort. "I can yell it as I walk down the street," she jokes. "'Yeah, I have long hair, but just so you know, I'm gay so don't get any big ideas!' My sexual identity is something I really value."

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Just when I was about to give up on dating all genders, I met a terrifically hot, mannish woman who was also interested in getting married and having a baby, and that's what we've done. Although my native orientation is so all over the place that no single identity really fits, I've found queer to be most accurate, as it stresses my allegiance to that community yet allows for lots of wiggle room.

Still, as a woman raising a child with another woman, I find myself circling back to the lesbian moniker I discarded so many years ago. My relationship is lesbian, I'm tagged as such by the public, and really, no one wants to hear the intricacies of my sexual preferences (except, hopefully, you).

Was I "born this way"? I really don't think so. Like many women, my sexuality is deeply fluid. But at the end of the day, I chose to be gay. There is a wonderful feeling of power in affirming that I want this lesbian life, even as I'm grateful for the activism that continues to make creating a family with a woman just one option among many. How strange and interesting it would be if our 1-year-old son grows into a world where he can date anybody, with no thought about what that might mean beyond connecting with a human being. Such a world feels tantalizingly in view. I'm on the edge of my seat.

Michelle Tea is an author whose works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, and fashion. Her most recent book is the memoir How to Grow Up.

This article was originally published as "Does Your Love Need a Label?" in the May 2016 issue of Cosmopolitan.

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